Andréa, Canis Lanonbinary

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keep thinking about how when
you melt it down glass tends toward being friendly and round but it has a reputation for being fragile and sharp because that's what happens when you pressure it thinner than its natural shape and subject it to trauma

This is a monstera (the very instagrammable plant, you might recognize it from animal crossing) but a different specis, Monstera adansonii. I got this earlier in the year and it's been growing like nuts but since it was the singular vine it looks kinda...scraggly. So I took off the top and I'm now propogating it in water.

How this works is the little joints of the plant can put out "aerial roots, which grabs onto a nearby tree or whatever to let it crawl up stuff. Or. It can grow normal-ass dirt roots. So if a cutting has a leaf, it'll keep making stuff from the sun, which lets it grow the roots to drink up more wotter, and, once you got enough roots, you can put it in the dirt and it'll become a regular plant.

Plants are kinda fucking wild, because all it needs to make food is sunlight (for the energy), water (H2O), and carbon dioxide from the air (CO2)¹. It then makes oxygen we breathe (O2), energy in the form the plant can use, and sugar (glucose)(C6H12O6). That's all it needs to live, it doesn't NEED dirt or anything else.

Well, that's not entirely true. It needs nitrogen and minerals and stuff like we do. That's why you can get iron and stuff from eating vegetables, it's grabbing that stuff from the dirt (and the stuff you put in the dirt, like fertilizer). But if you're just growing plants to be pretty (and especially to make additional plants like this. It'll go into the dirt with it's...parent? Self? To make it look fuller. Plants are fucking weird if you think about them too hard especially around philosophical concepts of self and being.

1. fun aside: when you lose weight, a lot of that is via the air. We breathe in O2 and exhale CO2....but where is that coming from? Food (and the food that's in storage in your body as fat and muscle). You weigh the least in the morning because you lost a lot of hydration and carbon from just breathin all night and not eating anything. I think how they figured this out is they had a guy sit in bed for a really long time and meticulously weighed the inputs (food) and....outputs (bodily waste). Everything should even out, right? But it didn't, so weight had to be lost via air exchange. Biology is so cool!